I was 14 when I came out to my family. This was in the summer of 1977. Toronto was reeling from news that a 12 year old boy named Emmanuel Jaques had been abducted and brutally murdered on the roof of a strip club. What made it all the more insidious was the fact that he was a shoeshine boy who would go down to the Yonge St strip on weekends to make money for his family. The news broke a few days before I came out. Timing has never been my strong point. We lived in the suburbs but my father's business was downtown. Every Saturday he would go to his office to do paperwork, leaving me alone with his second wife and her child, both of them responsible for so much abuse and hatred. She wanted my father to build a room for me in the basement leaving the 2 rooms upstairs, one for the 2 of them and the other one for her son. On this particular Saturday they were in the middle of bullying me, as usual, when I blurted something about being gay. I didn't come out in a controlled manner, I came out as a reaction to how I was being treated. Well that was no different that handing them my head on a silver platter. I was instructed to go to my room and wait for my father to get home. When he arrived I was in my room sobbing. I knew this was going to hurt my dad who I loved so much. Within 15 minutes of him arriving I heard him coming down the stairs. he came into my room and sat on my bed. His eyes were red from crying, something I had never seen before. He put his arms around me and said "don't worry son, we'll get you help". My step mother had her own doctor and it was him she contacted that Saturday afternoon. He agreed to see her and her son to determine if he was gay. My dad and I sat in the car waiting, when she came out she told my father there was no way her son could ever be gay. Back at the house the tension was brutal. On Monday morning my father told me to get in the car, we were going for a drive. I had no idea where until we turned onto the grounds of the Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital. This was not a clinic, this was a One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, that's what this was. It was raining that day when we pulled up to the building that housed the "child and adolescent unit". Hovering just inside the main doors were a man and a woman. When my dad stopped the car the man, who turned out to be a doctor, came to my door to escort me into the building while the woman, who was a nurse, went around to my father's side where he handed her a small bag with some of my clothing and toiletries. It had all been prearranged. My father barely said good bye, he didn't want to come into the unit to see where I would be living. I've often wondered if maybe the fact that I was adopted made it easier for him to discard me, or maybe he just didn't want to be haunted by the memory of where he was leaving his son. from that day forward I was disowned. I'd like to tell you how I survived and what tools I used to get over the pain, but I've already written so much, I'll try posting this and if it works I'll submit the 2nd part of this story later.
